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Description of  Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, 1815 1867

0521115086 pdf This ambitious and provocative study provides a unique narrative of nineteenth-century English political history. Based on extensive research the book draws on critical theory to read and interpret a vast range of oral, visual and printed sources, in an attempt to expand our conception of the politics of the period. Read in the context of such sources, nineteenth-century English politics becomes resolved into a story about the struggle to define the nation's constitution, past, present and future. It suggests the existence of a popular strain of English libertarian politics, albeit one whose radical and democratic potential was gradually closed down. In short, despite the invention of a liberal constitution in this period, politics became less (not more) democratic, a lesson which the author sees as pertinent for many struggling to live in, or establish, liberal democratic constitutions in our own times. Read more